Australian expats hope for highway of continued serendipitous Sri Lankan property success: Title Tattle
The former Sydney television producer Karl Steinberg and the former BT Investment manager Christopher Ong farewelled one of Sri Lanka's boutique accommodation destinations, the Galle Fort Hotel, last month. They'd received an almost serendipitous $US7 million offer through Berthold and Kotthoff Associates for their hotel set within the Galle Fort in the south of Sri Lanka. Following the renovation of the former Dutch gem merchant's property by the duo, it came to enjoy an international reputation for its minimalist and heritage-inspired design by Channa Daswatte. Just four weeks after the hotel opened, the December 2004 Asian tsunami struck, but luckily for them the fort, built to withstand cannons with 20-metre-thick ramparts, was mostly spared. The Portuguese, the Dutch and the English all made Galle their main administrative centre to rule over Sri Lanka, with Galle Fort now a major tourist attraction especially after being declared a World Heritage Site in 1988.
The hotel's new owner, the Lankem Group, is a diversified conglomerate with interests in paints, agro chemicals, consumer products, plantations and leisure resorts. Steinberg and Ong are now at Georgetown in Penang, Malaysia, another World Heritage-listed town, where they have overseen several tourism projects, including Clove Hall, an Anglo-Malay Edwardian bungalow, which was sold last July. The duo haven't been in the Sydney gaze for several years now. In 2001 Kate McClymont, the much-missed weekly SMH Saturday Sauce columnist, turned SMH investigative journalist, wrote gleefully about their inner-city brouhaha at the award-winning Altair Engelen Moore-designed Rushcutters Bay residential building. Title Tattle seems to recall that no sooner had the duo moved into their $2.6 million eastern aspect penthouse – with two miniature papillons, Max and Chien – than they were caught in a strata spat after the body corporate management committee ruled that dogs wouldn't be allowed anymore in the high rise. In 2003 they sold their Killcare weekenders on the NSW Central Coast, and their Altair penthouse sold in 2007 for $5 million.
Unprepared for another chilly Christmas vacation and property appraisals at Cap Ferrat, on the so-called Bay of Billionaires in the south of France, Title Tattle headed off instead to Sri Lanka with its not quite comparable Bay of Bengal. But there were holidaying royals and jetsetters nonetheless. The Prince and Princess Michael of Kent – whose relatives ran Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon, for 133 years until 1948 – were spotted at lunch at the Amangalla in Galle while on a private trip, later issuing official photos of them visiting the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage. Title Tattle saw that Sydney adman Neil Lawrence described the orphanage as a degrading circus show on Twitter after his recent visit to the beautiful island which he otherwise thoroughly enjoyed.
And Title Tattle did come across the international jetsetting couple Francesco and Gael Boglione. Gael is an expatriate Melbourne model who went to London in the '70s and then married Francesco, an insurance broker from Turin who describes himself as an old hippie. They reside at the elegant Petersham House on the Thames River in Richmond, after their friend Mick Jagger, who lived nearby, tipped them off that the Queen Anne home was for sale in the mid-1990s. They also own the neighbouring garden nursery where they secured Skye Gyngell to operate the Petersham Nurseries Cafe. Anyway, the Bogliones stayed briefly at Mahawella, aka The Last House, in Tangalle, which was the final private residence designed by the internationally acclaimed architect Geoffrey Bawa, who's credited as the pioneer of tropical modernism. The couple's Palm Beach, Sydney retreat is still being rebuilt. Set overlooking Pittwater, La Rosa was bought for $5,461,286 from glamazon Amanda Nankervis.
Geoffrey Bawa, who died in 2003, was a major source of inspiration for landscape designer Jamie Durie. He met Bawa during a pilgrimage to his mother's Sri Lankan birthplace. It was from Bawa and his home Lunuganga overlooking Dedduwa Lake that Durie says he acquired one of "the greatest design tools on my belt". "Bawa's designs teach to never give away all of the landscape at one glance; applying this lesson gives me the opportunity to provide the gifts of discovery and intrigue in the gardens I create." On his last book tour Durie suggested compartmentalisation creates sacred space and intrigue in a garden. “Just by changing levels and using screens and so forth, you can differentiate from one space to the next without having to put up gates and fences. The great lesson I learnt from Lunuganga is the impact of level changes to consolidate the focus of a landscape, because it allows you to direct the viewer's attention to the immediate foreground without distraction and to keep other areas hidden for later surprise."
The late Donald Friend, a close friend of Bawa, was perhaps Bawa's earliest Australian connection while the artist stayed on the island for four years from the late 1950s. Friend did a six-metre long mural of the ancient city of Galle (pictured above), which is hung on the executive floor of the John Keells Group supermarket group in Colombo. Later in Bali a loose collaboration between Friend, the Jakartan filmmaker Wija Waworuntu, the Sydney architect Peter Muller and Bawa, "cooked up Bali style'' in the 1970s according to architecture writer Elizabeth Farrelly. But seemingly it’s Sri Lanka where Friend began his fascination for paintings that featured doors. These paintings would be worth far more nowadays than any of the houses.
These days the continued strong Australian expatriate presence is hidden mostly behind plainer doors across Sri Lanka, and especially in the coastal south. Galle Fort's narrow Lighthouse Street has Orchard House (pictured above and below), the sometime home of the doyenne of Sydney's interior design Leslie Walford and his partner, Colin Davies. Walford, who celebrated his 85th birthday this week at his Double Bay penthouse, typically heads to Galle every January. It was while visiting an Australian friend for the millennium they unexpectedly bought a ruined 18th-century house within the fort.
They have since created a home of casual luxury with white walls and floors, soft furnishings and ornaments adding colour, antique Dutch-period four-poster beds, and a beautiful pillared internal pavilion with pool and garden that only can been gleaned from the property's website.
Walford once infamously told the SMH writer Susan Wyndham they "turned four bricklayers into butlers" who come with the four-bedroom house when rented out to tourists. They are really its manager, housekeeper, cook and gardener.
High above Unwatuna Beach, just outside Galle, is the occasional retreat of the noted Australian landscape designer Andrew Pfeiffer, whose family hails from Cooma, NSW. With all his international travel, the villa is where he has time to stop and take in the native flowers including the Nil Manel water lily, which Buddhist lore suggests was one of the 108 auspicious signs found on Prince Siddhartha's footprint. After Pfeiffer first left school to work in the CBD he'd head at lunch time to the Botanic Gardens. His formal training in botany followed at London's Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and the Kalmthout Arboretum in Belgium. For a time the head gardener at the Packers’ 30,000-hectare Ellerston Station in the NSW Hunter, he's done everything from window boxes to a 400-hectare development in Mallorca, Spain, financed by Prince Nawaf bin Abdul Aziz, brother of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia.
Sri Lanka is just 435 kilometres long and 225 kilometres wide, and 6.5 million hectares in size, comparable with Tasmania's 6.8 million hectares. But Sri Lanka's recklessly driven buses make most roads a noteworthy hazard, with official data showing some 150 daily accidents and five deaths. The new main highway running through the country ought to make travel quicker and safer, spanning eventually from Colombo to Hambantota, the district where the Chinese are helping with the new airport and port in the constituency of the president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, whose doing a good job playing the emerging superpowers India and China off against each other. He's also Minister of Finance, Defence, Planning, Ports, Aviation and not suprisingly Highways.
The country's main connection with Australia – barring our love of Dilmah tea after the introductory 1988 advertising campaign by Kamahl – is cricket. And an interesting link concluded last August with the death of Gamini Goonesena, who helped blaze a trail for Asian cricketers making the game formerly controlled by the British Empire more international. Goonesena captained his homeland in an unofficial test against India in 1956 and later against Pakistan before Sri Lanka - let's ignore the latest one day collapse - gained full international status in 1981. When he was the first Asian captain of Cambridge University, he scored 211 runs against Oxford, the highest ever score in the matches, which began in 1827. Working in Australia for the Ceylon Tea Board and as third secretary to the embassy in Canberra, Goonesena played in Sydney's first-grade competition for Waverley. Goonesena, who died in Canberra aged 80, helped NSW win the Sheffield Shield in 1960-61 around the time he married his first wife, Phillida Douglas-Robertson, who still owns what was their Paddington, Sydney abode.
The three "T"s – tea, tourism and textiles – remain Sri Lanka's economic stalwarts. The owners of the famous Cricket Club in Colombo, Australians James and Gabrielle Whight, from Melbourne, fell in love with the country on a visit 14 years ago and stayed setting up their own company, Whight and Co Luxury Merchants, which at one stage was reportedly going to attempt harvesting a coffee crop. Of course Sri Lanka's coffee plantations were wiped out by leaf rust in 1869, subsequently to be replaced by tea perhaps most notably by Dilmah founder Merrill J. Fernando, whose sons have overseen its internationalisation since 1988 into one of the top 10 tea brands in the world. Like Dilmah’s colonial bungalows for tourists with their working tea estates, the Whights have a vacation rental property, Lavender House, an 1890s bungalow set amidst the Hellboda Tea plantation in Pussellawa, midway between Kandy and Nuwara Eliya.
Laurie Rose, whose maitre d’ at the Italian Restaurant operated by the Van Handels at Byron Bay, is also the founder of the Talalla Yoga and Surfing Retreat (pictured above) in Sri Lanka. The 1.6-hectare property is situated in south in a quiet fishing village, just meters from the beach. The 32-room venue comes with a large yoga shala, a 20-metre swimming pool and quaint bungalows around the pool, which is surrounded by coconut palms. Monkeys were running through the grounds when Title Tattle called by for a eka pada sirsasana session.
And property plays appear to be quite popular – and not just with the big names locals like Sri Lankan batsman Mahela Jayawardene and actress Anarkali Akarsha, who are both said to have bought vacant beachfront building blocks on Weligama Beach, 146 kilometres south of Colombo. Indeed Australians give English elephant polo set considerable competition when it comes to owning various villas in the luxury rental pool. Australian couple David and Elizabeth Dawborn – he's a longtime partner with Herbert Smith's Indonesian law firm – own Indisch (pictured above), the Richard Emory-designed villa at Ahangama, 20 kilometres south of Galle.
Barbara Gall, who hails from South Australia, co-owns the If Villa (pictured above), a Dutch-style villa on two acres south of Galle. Gall initially moved to Hong Kong in 1973, with her husband, the late Justice Thomas Gall, when he was appointed as crown counsel in Hong Kong. And she's been involved in the development of schools for many decades including after her move to Sri Lanka in 2006.
Another Australian owns the Silva Tree property (pictured above), quite minimalist in a jungle of green to a design by Philip Weeraratne overlooking Unawatuna Bay from Rhumassala. The Beach Place, a beachside two-storey villa (pictrured below) in the village of Thalpe on the Galle coast, was designed for Australian owners.
Nisala Arana, a 1.6-hectare estate island off Bentota on Sri Lanka's west coast, is a former home of the village Ayurvedic doctor and its gardens filled with medicinal trees have all been maintained by its Australian owner. Kingsley's Pearl, a five-bedroom beach villa in Thalpe, one of the beautiful small bays just to the south of Galle, is owned Brian and Colleen Pieris, who split their time between Tweeds Heads, Coolongatta and the Sri Lankan villa they bought in 2010. Previously known as Sanda Kirana when first built by Australian architect Bruce Fell-Smith, the couple renamed the villa after Brian's Sri Lankan parents, the late diplomat Kingsley Peiris and his wife, Pearl. The Pieris family business does building maintenance along the Gold and Tweed coasts from Mantra Resort Kingscliff, to Q1 observation deck and Dreamworld.
Architect Bruce Fell-Smith has his own villa (pictured above), Victoria, set in a coconut grove on a stretch of beach at Thalpe, which is available for rent at between $US500 and $850 a night. The Melbourne University-educated architect has been particularly active in Sri Lanka over recent years. Kahanda Kanda at Koggala, a hilltop resort amid tea plantations, is his most striking. It means "Yellow Moon Mountain" in Sinhalese, and Turtle Bunbury, the writer of Living in Sri Lanka, suggests it’s among the most inspired of the new villas to have been built in Sri Lanka. A steep rocky path leads to a set of steps flanked by two walls, one the colour of aubergine, the other of saffron (pictured below).
The pathway has been dubbed the Great Wall of Kahanda by its owner English interior designer George Cooper, with its windows giving lovely vignettes of the hinterland high above Koggala Lake. One of his first commissions in 1993 was Villa Tusk at Dalawella, a small village on the fringe of Unawatuna famed for its swathe of tusk-shaped golden sand beaches.
But perhaps Sri Lanka's most dramatic home (pictured above and below) is on bushland red clifftops, an imposing design by the Osaka, Japan architect Tadao Ando. Its huge exposed concrete, apparently arranged to contain a series of protected courtyards and voids, was built for the philanthropic Belgian industrialist Pierre Pringiers, who came to Sri Lanka as a traveller, and in 1985 started his own rubber tyres manufacturing factory, which became the international Solideal group.
The house was a gift to his wife, the artist Saskia Pintelon. Remarkably Ando never visited the site before construction and has not been there since its completion, according to Architectural Review – instead relying on long-term Japanese collaborators Kiyoshi Aoki and Yukio Tanaka, who liaised with local firm PWA Architects. The local paper says crocodiles, leopards, elephants and monkeys roam in the vast jungle estate that borders the road to Mirissa Beach. Its too recent to be included in any architectural books.
One of Sri Lanka's most enchanting, though not that practical villas, is Taprobane Island (pictured above) at Weligama Bay where you're more likely to see cows wandering on the beach rather than elephants. Maurice de Mauny Talvande, the self-styled Count who fled Europe amid a whirl of financial and sexual scandals on the eve the Great War came to Ceylon to stay with the tea magnate Sir Thomas Lipton. He secured the island in 1925 for 250 rupees and constructed an octagonal shaped neo-Palladian villa in the 1930s. Maurice died of a heart attack in 1941 and his son, Victor, sold the island the following year. In 1952 the American writer Paul Bowles began a three-year self-internment on the island, during which he wrote the novel, The Spider's House, incorporating the house as a setting in the book. Arthur C. Clarke and Peggy Guggenheim were among those who came to visit the island during Bowles' tenure, after which he seemingly left empty-handed. In 2006 writer Christopher Ondaatje wrote that Lonbdon barrister Sir Desmond de Silva's island was permanently leased to the tourism entrepreneur Geoffrey Dobbs. Visitors tend to wade out to the island at low tide. It rents in peak season for about $2,200 a night.
Luxury resort pioneer Adrian Zecha was among those whose aim has been to transform the south of Sri Lanka into something akin to Asia's Riviera. He bought the New Oriental Hotel, one of Asia's oldest hotels, having first traded in 1863, from Nesta Ephramus Brohier, an old Dutch burgher family member in 1995. Eventually the decaying but atmospheric premises became Amangalla, which since 2005 has been a landmark sub-continental luxury resort. Australian architect Kerry Hill oversaw the refurbishment of Amangalla's main 1684 building, which was constructed as headquarters for the Dutch commander, with Potts Point designer Terry Fripp installing chandeliers in brushed stainless steel to resemble Dutch pewter.
Some 80 kilometres away at Tangalle is the Amanwella resort (pictured above), which reflects Kerry Hill's strong influences arising from his friendship with Geoffrey Bawa. Title Tattle can attest that Amanwella offers a great Australian beef burger for lunch, but is yet to ask the recent visitor, AFR travel writer Deirdre Macken for her culinary conclusion. Or the Sri Lankan chef of SBS fame Peter Kuruvita whose currently doing his stuff in the Philippines.
For those who aren't "Amanjunkies" – the term coined within the accommodation industry to refer to Amanresorts' repeat customers who pay an average $850 a night – Zecha's name might ring a bell as he briefly owned a small strategic stake in the Bennelong development site at East Circular Quay in the 1980s. He also co-founded Regent Hotels, one of Asia's early five-star chains, and then owned Bowral's Milton Park in the 1990s. He sold the Edwardian-style 1910 Hordern family retreat in the Southern Highlands, managed at the time by Alistair Anderson and his wife, Anna Maunsell, and accredited by Relais et Chateaux Group as one of the top 50 country guesthouses in the world, for $7.25 million to the current owner, John Dobler. Amanresorts, located in 15 countries around the world (its name comes from the Sanskrit for peace), has been owned by DLF Limited, India's largest real estate company, since 2007, with Zecha still retaining a significant role. In his last big interview, Zecha told the Wall Street Journal that only two of Aman's 18 resorts were unprofitable – both the Sri Lanka ones. The former Time magazine journalist Zecha, born to a wealthy plantation family in Indonesia, privately retains prime beachfront property on the coast at Thalpe, where he apparently plans to build his retirement retreat.
It was 1983 when the bitter civil war erupted between the Sinhalese-dominated government and the Tamil Tigers began, officially ending in the spring of 2009. The strong police and military presence – more so around Colombo – is a reminder of the fears that conflict isn't dead and buried. Indeed this week the possibility of the re-emergence of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka from sympathisers abroad was raised by Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa. "There are ex-LTTE cadres, pro-LTTE activists and LTTE sympathizers still operating in various guises through various groups in many countries around the world," he advised at a public lecture on “Future Challenges to National Security in Sri Lanka” organised by Sri Lanka Foundation Institute and Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Limited.
Tag-lining Sri Lanka as "the coasts less travelled", Condé Nast Traveller nominated the country as one of the top five hottest new destinations to watch in year 2012. "One of the great joys of travel is the feeling you've discovered somewhere special, somewhere that's all yours, for the first time – before the developers move in and the crowds descend. It could be a new and unexplored region, like the Arctic Circle, or an entire country that has been off-limits to tourists for political reasons, such as Sri Lanka and Burma." It noted, quite correctly, that you can find yourself the only tourist in the traditional villages, and even the only person on some of the country's most beautiful beaches. "This does, of course, mean top-class accommodation is still limited," the magazine says. Sri Lanka's annual tourist arrivals in 2011 jumped 30% to a record 855,000. Its previous record arrivals was 654,000 in 2010. Visitors from Western Europe accounted for 315,000 visitors, some 171,000 from India and 106,000 from the United Kingdom. Total tourists stood at 336,000 in 2001, and averaged 450,000 in the interim. Typically 25,000 Australasia tourists visited annually.
And as Title Tattle made for the Colombo airport departure lounge there was the island hopping Senator Christine Milne arriving in early January from Tasmania. She's presumably not staying for the Sixth HSBC Galle Literary Festival, which has triggered playwright Tom Stoppard's rather lengthy sojourn on the island virtually since appearing at the Sydney Opera House last month. Stoppard's then onto the Jaipur Literature Festival. David Thompson, the celebrated chef, who recently sold his family home at Earlwood in Sydney for $750,000, is also on the list of Galle literary festival participants. His 2001 Nahm restaurant in London was the first Thai restaurant ever to be awarded a Michelin star and in 2010 he opened Nahm in the Metropolitan Hotel in Bangkok. The chef who made his culinary mark at Darley Street Thai restaurant in Sydney and then at Sailors Thai at The Rocks has for many years researched Thai culinary techniques and ancient recipes. He's had two books published. He and cooking writer Josceline Dimbleby are speaking on the taste of wanderlust
There's a villa for sale (pictured above) on Middle Street in the Galle Fort precinct at $US935,000, although it seemingly was initially listed at close to $US1 million. It’s an 18th-century Dutch house described by Marcus Binney of the UK Times as being “as smart as any villa in Provence or Tuscany”. Behind its traditional street-side veranda, there's 511 square metres of built area and garden of 93 square metres. The ads says it has a 505-square-metre extent, i.e., its land size. The renovations were undertaken by RA Designs, and featured in the 2006 book Living In Sri Lanka by Turtle Bunbury with photographs by James Fennell. The three-bedroom villa is available for nightly rent at between US$330 and US$650. Prices in the fort tend to equate to about $US10,000 a perch and beachfront prices trail off so that at nearer Matara they are about a fifth in price. The new highway development should cause that differential to flatten a little making purchases of land further south relatively good value given their discount to Galle. Across the road from beachfront is typically a quarter of the price of beachfronts.Many expats’ first point of contact is with Jack Eden at Eden Villas, which has many villas on its rental book. Jack, a relative of the former British prime minister Anthony Eden, arrived in Sri Lanka with his wife, Jo, and their two children in 1998. Everyone will be keeping an eye out for a new tax scheme under consideration by the government that will remove the restrictions on foreign buyers. Currently if land is purchased by a foreign investor, a tax payment of 100% of the purchase price is required. But if a foreign investor incorporates a company in Sri Lanka under the Companies Act and buys land in the name of the company, tax payment is not required, even though the shareholders of the company are foreign nationals.
